Homes

An easy, forgiving, eco-friendly yard

Drought-resistant rock gardens ideal for novice green thumbs

Raquel Feroe looks forward to using more native plants such as the yellow lady's slipper into her garden.

Photograph by: Chris Schwarz
, Edmonton Journal

When Raquel Feroe began creating her low-maintenance rock garden, she simply started with a pile of dirt left behind by the contractor who had built her home. The busy specialist in internal medicine says she knew what she didn't want: to maintain a lawn, to buy annuals every spring or to worry about regular watering. Instead, she created a front yard where, "there is nothing I have to do - only things I like doing."

Other than purchasing large stone pavers to create a curving path to her front porch, most of Feroe's investment has been in sweat equity. For plants, she chose aggressive, "weedy" ground covers to reap immediate results.

She started with snow-in-summer, sedums, creeping Jenny and creeping thyme, each of which need only regular watering to become established. Feroe advises beginner gardeners to really become familiar with the soil they are gardening, and then to be realistic about what is achievable.

"Big questions are: Dry or wet? Well-drained or not?" Feroe says. "For example, some plants like to stay consistently moist, while others like a good watering, but will get root rot without enough drainage."

Other considerations include shade or sun, tall or short, native or non-native, edible or not, and aggressive or well-behaved.

"If I had to do it again, I'd just do native plants and really celebrate the cool local plants we have," says Feroe, adding that she plans to start adding yellow lady's slipper and some of Alberta's 26 other native orchids to her yard. She recommends prairie crocus because it is an attractive early bloomer.

Other plants she's added include a "cute" prairie native in the iris family called blue-eyed grass, wood lilies in contrasting fuchsia and orange, and low-lying delicate dryas.

Feroe encourages learning by trial and error. For example, if she really likes a plant, she'll get three and place them in different areas of the yard - to find out where they are happiest.

She also doesn't waste any time on struggling plants.

"If you are fighting aphids on lupins each year, get rid of them and try something else."

Feroe says she's gained a lot of knowledge by joining the Edmonton Naturalization Group (edmontonnaturalizationgroup.org), an informal group that promotes the use of native plants. She also encourages inexperienced gardeners to "talk to the locals."

"There's probably some really good gardeners in your area with nice plants. I think that's the whole sport of gardening - being outside and talking to neighbours."

Feroe has learned from her mistakes, however. When she was laying down her slate pavers, "I just smoothed down the dirt and threw down a rock," rather than putting down sand and making sure they were levelled. "So, they're wearing out a lot quicker than they should."

Since she started it a decade ago, her yard has evolved into more of a habitat for the natural world, rather than manicured eye candy. A story from last summer makes her especially proud.

One day, she says, she noticed a lot of somethings crawling on a plant that she'd been given as a gift and then forgotten about.

"I saw these huge caterpillars on it. Fifteen years ago, I might have thought, 'Oh, go get the pesticide.' "

But Feroe has amended that approach since she started reading labels and realized that many of the ingredients in gardening products are the same chemicals she learned about while studying toxicology in medical school.

Instead of doing away with the caterpillars, she watched with interest as they head-butted each other, fighting for food. "There were 12 of them and they were eating the plant to smithereens; they had it chewed down to nubbins and all the green was gone."

The grubs were monarch butterflies and Feroe was able to find and keep an eye on one of the chrysalides, which later took flight and disappeared over her neighbour's fence.

The plant they'd found so irresistibly tasty was a native low milkweed, and despite their feasting, it came back spectacularly about three weeks later, and bloomed in the fall.

Feroe has also learned to embrace plants that are really hard to love.

"Every thistle is edible - just peel off the prickly parts. Dandelions do exist in my yard, for one reason: I pull them out and grind them for coffee roasting or for hot compost" - a rapid composting technique using carbon-and nitrogen-rich materials like grass clipping and dry leaves.

Pesticide-free and drought-resistant, Feroe's front yard is also "easy," because she lets it do its own thing.

"But occasionally, I get out the shovel and refresh areas that have upset my sensibilities. A non-native Hungarian violet has taken over and I plan to attack it this spring."

Otherwise, Feroe will sit back and enjoy sharing her garden with neighbours and local fauna.

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